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Freelancing Your Way to a Job

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Workshop Customer Service Contest alternate photo low resby Mike O’Mary

December unemployment numbers will be reported on January 8, and recent weekly reports on unemployment claims indicate that things are getting better. But it’s still a tough economy out there. As of the end of November, U.S. unemployment was 10%, and underemployment (a freelance writer bagging groceries, for example) was 17.2%. Pretty grim.

If you are freelancing by choice, my hat is off to you. I know some people who have very successful freelance careers and would never consider going to work for someone else. But if you’re freelancing because you’ve been laid off, I have good news for you: freelancing just might be the best way to find your next job.

Twice in the past decade, I was offered (and I accepted) corporate jobs from my clients. So my tip for those of you who desire a corporate job is to offer up your services as a freelancer first. I believe this is actually a better way to get a job than competing with the dozens (or hundreds or sometimes even thousands) of people sending in resumes for job openings.

In the two cases where clients offered jobs to me, I went to the client with no ulterior motive. I really was not looking for a job. I was looking for freelance work. I didn’t want them to give me a job; I wanted to give them some help. That difference in attitude made a difference to them. And in both instances, there was a definite sense that they had discovered me…their attitude was almost a joyful “look what I found!” (Compare that to the attitude of a potential employer during a job interview where all-too-often they are looking for reasons not to hire you.)

Bottom line: Don’t mislead a potential employer. If you’re not interested in freelancing, then don’t present yourself as a potential freelancer. But if you are interested in freelancing – and if you are also interested in the possibility of a full-time job with the right employer – then marketing yourself as a freelancer just might be the best way to get your foot in the door to your next job.

Mike O’Mary is founding dreamer of Dream of Things, a book publisher and online community for writers and other artists.

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An Hour Per Minute

tortoise-hareby Mike O’Mary

“Why does writing a speech take so long?” That’s the question a former boss asked me when I told her it was going to take me 40 hours to write a 40-minute speech for our CEO.

I didn’t have a good answer to her question. “Because it does,” was the only response I could manage. And in retrospect, that was probably as good of an answer as she deserved. But upon further reflection, I had a very good answer. I knew from 20 years of experience as a speechwriter that it takes about an hour per minute to write a speech. Some speeches take less; some take more. But an hour per minute is a pretty good rule of thumb.

My boss’s perception—and the perception of many people who don’t write for a living—is that a writer should be able to dash off a 40-minute speech in an afternoon or two. And truth be told, depending on the type of speech, it is sometimes possible to write a speech in just a few hours. It would have to be a speech on a topic that the speechwriter already knew quite well, so it wouldn’t require any research or revision, which would make it a very rare type of speech. But it’s possible. In the past, I’ve whipped up short speeches on short notice. An example would be a motivational or inspirational speech to employees that is strong on emotional appeal and light on facts and figures.

But this particular 40-minute speech was to an external audience of industry experts at a trade show. And actually, it wasn’t really a speech. It was a presentation with a script. In addition to research and revisions, it was going to require preparation of a PowerPoint presentation. I wasn’t putting the PowerPoint presentation together (if I was, I would have added 50 percent to my time estimate). But it was still going to require time to gather facts and review the presentation, so an hour per minute was a fairly conservative estimate.

With a little math, the hour-per-minute estimate for speech preparation can be adapted for other types of writing. People speak at a rate of 100 to 150 words per minute. So if you assume a “median” speaking rate of 125 words per minute, you can assume for time-budgeting purposes that it’s going to take about an hour to write 125 words for a speech—or for any other type of communication. Again, that estimate includes research and revision time.

A disclaimer: I was not trained as a journalist and have never worked as a journalist. I offer this disclaimer because I know some journalists will scoff at the idea of taking an hour to write 125 words. That’s because some journalists have a superhuman ability to crank out vast volumes of words under tight deadlines, often after consuming quantities of caffeine that cause kidney failure in a normal human being. Of course, many journalists also experience a high rate of job burnout. So for my money (and my sanity), an hour a minute works pretty well.

Mike O’Mary is founding dreamer of Dream of Things, a book publisher and online community for writers and other artists.